The People, No
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The eminent lawyer thundered on: “Such a purpose is in defiance of everything that history teaches and of the tenets upon which our civilization has been founded.” 17
Civilization’s downfall was even more alarmingly illustrated by the New Deal’s revival of the old system of slavery, under which some people “had the right, by law, to expropriate the time and labor of other groups.” Now, Shaw accused, it was back, in different form:
Under this new status, it is proposed by taxation to confiscate the property of some citizens; expropriate the time and labor of those who work and are still willing to work and to give the proceeds thereof to those who don’t work, many of whom are unwilling to work. The latter have a legal right to enjoy the property, the time and the service of the former.
The welfare state was bondage all over again. “The only difference between this present status and the slavery that obtained prior to 1860 is this,” Shaw continued: “That in the present status the inefficient become the masters and the efficient and the thrifty are the slaves. That is the logic of the New Deal.” 18 The natural order of human society was being tragically reversed before these respectable gentlemen’s very eyes.
For the Liberty League and its allied forces, what the New Deal represented was not merely a political reversal but a scrambling of the entire hierarchy of existence. It had worked this evil by obeying the preferences of people who, while they might constitute an electoral majority, really had no business making such decisions … which is ultimately to say that the real problem was democracy itself.
The point was made in a League pamphlet by the attorney William R. Perkins, the man for whom Duke University’s main library was later named. After musing upon the various outrages the Roosevelt administration was then supposedly inflicting on the Constitution in the name of “the people,” Perkins declared that “this is but the old, old rule of numbers, a form of government which proved the scourge of national existence and became thoroughly discredited long, long ago for an unanswerable reason.” That reason: “It vests complete, direct power in those who are least endowed, least informed, have least, and thereby reduces government to the lowest common denominator.” 19
Popular sovereignty, Perkins continued, was “utterly un-American,” the sort of thing advocated by Karl Marx, who “to the unending turmoil and suffering of Europe, likewise taught the proletariat to use their numerical superiority.” And now Franklin Roosevelt had brought this pernicious doctrine to America. The “democratic mass” was in control, Perkins warned, and disaster was around the corner. 20
Another problem with the people was that there were just too damn many of them. For Thomas Nixon Carver, a renowned Harvard economist, the vast numbers of undistinguished folks was not a godly virtue; it was another nightmare. Let the poor “multiply out of all proportion to the need for them,” he wrote in Nation’s Business in 1935, and they would undoubtedly destroy the capitalist system—either by “voting heavier and heavier taxes on property for the benefit of the propertyless” or else “by violence,” should it come to that. He dubbed this “the population problem,” an explosive variable in a difficult economics equation. These people had to be carefully controlled by enlightened planners lest they swamp us all with their unbridled breeding. 21
Even the idea of equality was attacked. Speaking to an audience of lawyers in 1936, Frederick Stinchfield, a Liberty League personage who was soon to become the president of the American Bar Association, griped that “we used to be a virile, self-reliant people.” But something had gone wrong, and with the Depression Americans began looking to Washington to solve their problems. To help explain this degeneration, Stinchfield quoted from a then-popular book, Man, the Unknown , by the French biologist and Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel:
“Another error, due to the confusion of the concepts of human being and individual, is democratic equality.… Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their rights is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law.” *
Unfortunately, however, they were equals before the law, and the sad result of this democratic “error” was that, thanks to politics, losers were permitted to evade the losing that was their rightful lot in life. In truth it was even more perverse than that: democracy gave the weak a way to lord it over the strong. Stinchfield quoted Carrel some more:
“The standardization of men by the democratic ideal has already determined the predominance of the weak. Everywhere, the weak are preferred to the strong. They are aided and protected, often admired. Like the invalid, the criminal, and the insane, they attract the sympathy of the public.”
Science taught a lesson different from the populist folly of democracy, however. Humans succeeded or failed, science supposedly told us, largely because they were born to succeed or fail. If they were successful, it was often because they had better genes, or better blood, or were descended from better stock—that sort of thing. If they failed, heredity was again the reason. Once more the eminent lawyer cited the words of the Nobel laureate:
“In democratic countries, such as the United States and France, for example, any man had the possibility during the [nineteenth] century of rising to the position his capacities enabled him to hold. Today, most of the members of the proletarian class owe their situation to the hereditary weakness of their organs and their mind.… Today, the weak should not be artificially maintained in wealth and power.”
Oddly enough, the ideal for which Stinchfield marshaled all this genetic fatalism was self-reliance. What was missing from the political debates of the thirties, the lawyer charged, was some understanding by ordinary Americans that the responsibility for the Depression lay with each and every one of them—some recognition that the way you dealt with hard times was by toughening up and looking within, not by pointing at big external forces. Ah, “what a difference it might have made, could we have heard from someone in official authority in the last six years that a man’s misfortune is brought about by himself in part or in whole.” 22
But why should anyone feel personal responsibility for his or her situation when it was really determined by centuries of breeding? To ask the question is to answer it. Given the political requirements of the American Liberty League in 1936, both the sunny credo of individualism and the ugly science of eugenics led to the same imperative: You must not challenge or overthrow society’s elites. The weak must learn their place and be satisfied with their lot.
The pamphlet with which the Liberty League spread Frederick Stinchfield’s ideas across the land does not tell us how his audience of accomplished professionals reacted to his talk; whether they grasped the contradiction of celebrating hereditary elites and the American way at the same time; whether they understood the paradox of aligning FDR with fascism while using quasi-fascist arguments against him. But we do know that the business community stood united against Roosevelt. As one CEO put it in 1936, the president was opposed “almost unanimously by the business and professional men of the country.” 23
* * *
IT IS TO those “professional men” that we turn now. Today we think of the New Deal as the historic dawn of professional power, the moment when expertise finally came together with government. After all, Roosevelt was famously advised by a “brain trust” of college professors, and the New Deal was staffed with hundreds of idealistic young college grads. As the sociologist Edward Shils put it years later, much of the backlash against FDR was no more than “friction” caused by “the entry of the intellectuals into politics and administration.” 24
What we find difficult to recall is how very far outside the professional and academic orthodoxies of the time the New Deal intellectuals actually stood. From monetary theory to wage-and-hour regulation, the policies FDR pursued were massive violations of the reigning faiths of classical economics, and just as in 1896, academics let the public know it. In 1933, ninety eminent economists got together to decry FDR’s departure from the gold s
tandard, and in 1934 the New Deal got the full Harvard treatment, with seven notable economists from that institution publishing a book-length rebuke of FDR’s program. 25
“Money-tinkerers” and “demagogues” were the terms favored by Professor Walter E. Spahr, chairman of New York University’s economics department, when describing Roosevelt and his advisers in 1935. The Great Depression was unlike all others, Spahr fumed, not only because it was more severe, but also because the nation had—foolishly, incredibly—turned over control of its government to the worst sort of “rabble rousers”: money cranks who had, in their madness, taken the nation off gold. “It should be an arresting fact that not one of these demagogic leaders is ever a well trained person in monetary affairs,” he vituperated. Oh, the president had been given the opportunity to listen to real experts. “Instead of profiting by such expert advice,” however,
this Administration has chosen to surround itself with monetary advisers of an exceedingly unorthodox sort—in most instances men of no standing or reputation or experience whatever in the field of monetary affairs. The consequence has been an orgy of wild and fantastic monetary legislation which has been the laughing stock of the leading monetary authorities of the world. 26
The economic heresies of the New Deal were enumerated in a roll call of respected American economists published by the Liberty League in 1936. Professors “of the highest standing” from Chicago, Brookings, and every Ivy League university cautioned against Roosevelt’s zany ideas. After heaping up all this evidence of professional consensus, the League pamphlet proceeded to its inevitable, contemptuous conclusion: The doctrines of the New Deal “do not find acceptance with the overwhelming majority of the academic profession.” 27
The point reverberated across the media landscape of the day. “The so-called ‘brain trust’ which has been advising the administration,” a 1936 editorial in the Los Angeles Times announced, “was selected not because the views of its members were considered sound by the consensus of eminent scholarship, but because they chimed in with what the administration wanted to do.” Or, as the Liberty League put it in one of its rare moments of brevity, “there are professors and professors.” There were accepted communicants in the church of orthodoxy and then there were heretics and outsiders—and FDR’s bunch were most definitely the latter. 28
One of the professors customarily name-checked in essays and pamphlets of this kind was the Harvard economist Thomas Nixon Carver, whom we met a few pages ago; he was an elder statesman of the discipline who had become a particularly determined opponent of the New Deal. In April 1936 he was appointed to head a division of a Republican brain trust that was supposed to study and explain the New Deal; no doubt he got the job because the year before he had authored a booklet called What Must We Do to Save Our Economic System? that had become a cult favorite among conservatives. 29
Carver’s views seem unremarkable when you first encounter them. In an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 1935, for example, he could be found lamenting the way government regulation and unemployment relief were undermining traditional American values and turning respectable people into “chiselers.” 30
But when Carver turned to the subject of working people—the nonrespectable ones whose lives had actually been ruined by the Depression—something in his manner seemed to change. As we have seen, he regarded these people not as strivers whose values needed to be respected, nor as the plain people honored by Carl Sandburg and Abraham Lincoln.
They were a menace. Carver deplored immigration from Mexico and the Philippines and then sighed over the “fact” that “people of low mentality cannot have a standard of living like that of people of high mentality and will therefore multiply according to their animal impulses and not according to any standard of family building.” He longed for a “population planner” to sort out this mushrooming mess. He expressed admiration for “Hitlerism” because Nazis dared to sterilize “defectives.” He urged us to “lend every possible encouragement” to entrepreneurs. He looked forward to a day when “the highly capable” had more children and “the less capable and less prosperous” had fewer. And then he suggested, by way of concrete policy proposals, that couples be forbidden to marry until they were able to buy a car. 31
This was stupid stuff, but the man pushing it was no crank. Thomas Nixon Carver was one of the country’s most celebrated economists and a confirmed believer in laissez-faire in most aspects of economic life. 32 But the private lives of ordinary people: oh, that was different. That was an area where intrusive supervision by super-planners was fully warranted and urgently required. After all, the system needed workers—that was just math—but not so many workers that they might pull off some kind of uprising against the system.
Up until this point in our story, anti-populism had real potential as a political approach. Finding some Harvard man to deplore the unorthodox ideas of the vulgar and the lowly had been a sound strategy in 1896.
But in 1936, appointing a man like Carver to lead a division of the Republican brain trust discredited not only Republicans but brains as well. About a month after his role in the GOP commission was announced, newspapers got wind of his booklet on population control and began mocking his prescriptions. Calling for the exclusion of certain races, requiring people to buy a car in order to marry, praising Hitler, and doing it all in the name of freedom—this was too much.
Americans don’t like to be told that their love lives are economically problematic to their betters. To chase such a noxious assertion with a shot of Sieg Heil is to make it even more toxic still—to place a cyanide cherry atop a creosote sundae, if you will. 33
* * *
HOW WAS THE great business offensive against the New Deal received in the cities and towns of America? We get a street-level view of the 1936 campaign in the memoirs of Thomas Hart Benton, the regionalist painter, who was struck by the angry expression of upper-class righteousness that he began to notice here and there. “In many polite houses” that summer, the painter remembers, “the voice of suspicious hate was directed toward the riffraff.”
Benton spent much of the ’36 election season touring his home state of Missouri, and in his recollections he tells of how he visited the tastefully decorated home of a retired banker, a man with a “highly developed sense” of “standing and prerogative.” During their conversation, Benton made the grave faux pas of saying something nice about the regulatory state. The banker erupted.
“The class of people who run the business of this country are the ones who know how to run it,” this grandee insisted. “It has come to an awful place when a lot of incompetents who won’t work when they have a chance can get up the nerve to insist that those who do work should divide with them.” Then his vehemence took a gory turn. Addressing the painter, the banker declared, “You have no respect for the traditions of your country but when the time comes you are going to learn, you and all your dissatisfied friends, that there are machine guns in the hands of the right people here to bring you back to your senses.” 34
Benton chalked the man’s outburst up to the newspapers, whose propaganda campaign “against Rooseveltian radicals” was “in full blast” that year. Something larger was going on as well: a certain kind of class bitterness was awakening in 1936—but “at the wrong end of society,” as Benton puts it. It was the exact mirror image of the decade’s proletarian plays and its social-realist murals—the well-to-do were discovering the peculiar grievances of the strong and the privileged.
* * *
IN 1936, THOSE grievances were not nearly enough. When November came, Franklin Roosevelt beat Alf Landon in one of the greatest landslides of all time, with Landon losing even his home state of Kansas. Even though prestigious polls declared a Republican victory to be inevitable, and even though newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst chain spread alarm with every drop of ink they could muster, Roosevelt won all but two states. The Liberty League’s crusade for the Constitution had failed utterly
.
African American voters abandoned the Republican Party for the New Deal. Unions backed the president overwhelmingly. Working-class districts everywhere ran up a gigantic score for Roosevelt. The American people had been asked to negate a political turn that, they were told, would lead to the destruction of freedom, to the rise of dictatorship, to mob rule and the end of civilization—and by and large the American people didn’t listen. The election of 1936 was to be a plebiscite on the regulatory welfare state, and through its actions the public, as New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg puts it, legitimated “the Leviathan state.” 35
The results were especially painful for the so-called Lords of the Press. They had come together as one, they had impugned the New Deal with the most emphatic words in the English language, and none of it had worked. Not only did the public ignore their warnings; the public did the opposite of what the media had instructed. As George Seldes pointed out at the time, Roosevelt seemed to run especially well in cities where he “had not one newspaper on his side.” The only possible conclusion was that people were casting votes for Roosevelt and also “against the newspapers in general.” 36
The Depression had proven too overwhelming an experience for ordinary people to dismiss the New Deal out of abstract, upper-class fears. Arthur Schlesinger put it well: “The spectacle of the rich men of the nation declaring that America was in the grip of revolution because their servants were no longer content with their wages was not one which deeply moved many of their fellow countrymen.” 37